It has never been a secret that the majority of files being shared over BitTorrent are movies and music that are likely being shared illegally. (Sorry, Linux distro nerds.) Princeton senior Sauhard Sahi confirmed this recently after setting out to survey the content available on BitTorrent and, although there are caveats to his findings, they highlight the relationship DRM has with illegal file sharing. As in: the more DRM there is on the legit versions of the content, the more popular it is on P2P.

Proposals to suspend the internet connections of those who repeatedly share music and films online will leave consumers with a bill for £500 million, ministers have admitted.

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Ministers have not estimated the cost of the measures but say that the cost of the initial letter-writing campaign, estimated at an extra £1.40 per subscription, will lead to 40,000 households giving up their internet connections. Impact assessments published alongside the Bill predict that the measures will generate £1.7 billion in extra sales for the film and music industries over the next ten years, as well as £350 million for the Government in extra VAT.

The European Parliament appears to have surrendered to pressure from Member States by abandoning amendment 138, a provision adopted on two occasions by an 88% majority of the plenary assembly, and which aimed to protect citizens' right to Internet access. The move paves the way for an EU wide policy supporting arbitrary restrictions of Internet access, such as customers being cut-off from the Internet by their ISP.

Under the original amendment 138 text any restriction of an individual could only be taken following a prior judicial ruling. The new update has completely removed this, meaning that governments now have legal grounds to force UK ISPs into disconnecting their customers from the Internet (i.e. such as when "suspected" of illegal downloading).

HADOPI 2 also preserves an earlier attempt to outlaw the "open WiFi defense" under which an accused file-sharer simply makes clear that anyone could have used his connection. Under the new law, all Internet users must keep their connections "secure" and are responsible for what happens on them.

We discover and distribute high quality open-licensed (Creative Commons) digital media and art, and provide support to Content Creators. We host creative content in its entirety, ensure fast, reliable downloads, and enable users to directly sponsor Content Creators and their work.

Darknets, themselves, are nothing new; networks like Tor, FreeNet, and Gnutella are well-established. The HP researchers say Veiled is the same idea, only much simpler: It doesn't require any software to participate, just an HTML 5-based browser. "We've implemented a simple, new darknet in the browser," Wood says. "There are no supporting [software] programs."

Firecoral’s goal is to scale web content distribution to end users by allowing mutually distrustful users to share their web browser caches, yet ensure the authenticity of content and enable users to preserve privacy by expressing flexible content sharing policies. To achieve these goals, we have built a Firefox extension that uses subscription-based XPath queries to extract URLs from web sites and redirect them to a proxy server running inside the browser.